I love decadence and ego in art, architecture, lifestyle, and sex, but, when it comes to fashion, I’m totally practical. I like to say I practice conservative functionalism and drop hints of conviviality with my colour schemes and accessorisation. So you can only imagine how this week’s Heatherette show reminded me of everything I hate about fashion week and everything I hate about New York (especially Williamsburg or, rather, especially the white people in Williamsburg). The fact that Amanda Lepore was involved only made my urge to kill grow stronger. The good news is I’m not Dexter Morgan, and so Richie Rich and Traver Rains don’t have to worry about me forcing them to expiate for their sins via homicidal sacrifice anytime soon.
Yeah, that was a Dexter plug. I know I’m a Johnny-come-lately, but Jesus Christ there need to be more fictional worlds centered in Miami. Paging Terry Goodkind!
Don’t get me wrong, I mostly love fashion week and I mostly love New York, but Heatherette was embarassingly tacky and embarassingly behind its time. The prevailing sentiment just a few days later seems to still be, among the celebrities and many critics, that the line is an apt ‘Fuck You’ to the fashion industry. That it’s cleverness is it’s tongue-in-cheek criticism of the Hollywood spectacle. The problem is, it isn’t a clever dig at all at the industry and it has nothing important to say. The Wizard of Oz as kitsch revue? Oh, that’s fucking brilliant because I can’t already head down to Rififi every Sunday and see it done for the next 8,000 years of human evolution. And, at Rififi, it’s fun because they understand that camp is functional. At Heatherette, it’s a desperate cry for attention from untalented wanks who couldn’t otherwise get it.
Heatherette is terrible because it’s unspeakably difficult to make something terrible out of camp. The show recycled dayglo again when dayglo was vogueish at least a year and a half ago. The show recycled asschaps again like it’s trying to send some message that Kenneth Anger movies belong in stores next to the Lion King. The show recycled tights again, but lost all the irony that was had by including them in the past because their practicality and sexuality has been capitalized on in mainstream fashion for the first time in a while and they’re the reason all of us boys and girls want to take Sienna Miller home. Camp is great because it disregards all the weight and meanings we drop on convention and emphasizes emotion, confetti, and fun. At the show, there was nothing new, nothing practical, no formal innovation, no stylistic development, and no fun. Nothing. There was just a clichéd, played out motif that even the gay clubs in places like Sacramento and Portland have gotten over. Judy Garland is a goddess, but any sensible Queen knows this is not a throne Dorothy would have sat on. This fall’s Heatheretter line was issued hoping that it’s meaninglessness would draw a horde of self-important movers and shakers who would seek to fill the vacuum with their own analytical substance and purpose. Of course, they did. That’s what fashion critics mostly do, but manipulating them into doing it isn’t anything new, isn’t hard, and it isn’t original. So, if you’re going to argue that was the intent of the folks at Heatherette, you’ll still have to somehow reconcile their intentions with the fact that the show sucked. And again, it wasn’t even fun.
For all the faux-intellectualism you have to sit through in Disco Bloodbath, St. James makes it clear that the Club Kids were having fun and wanted to have fun. That’s what made their camp practical: it sought and achieved a legitimate artistic, emotional end. I don’t agree with the means by which the Clean Kids got to happydom, but they understood the value of a good time. Their appreciation of fun mirrors that of La Movida Madrileña, as it allowed for both movements to maintain a respected editorial voice in the artistic community. Heatherette’s show failed because it treated camp and kitsch conventions like they’re something to be levelled against the mainstream. The problem is that’s not the intention of either. Camp seeks to demonstrate that the tacky, so long as it is practical and serves a purpose, is as legitimate as the palatial, the minimalist, and the popular. Along with the obscure, camp is intended to validate the mainstream. Therefore, it’s obviously an ineffective vehicle for criticizing it. Even more so than post-war-pre-Koizumi Japan’s labour market, Camp is egalitarian. Heatherette’s logic— in using camp to segregate the artistic community and to ‘criticize’ or ‘fuck’ the fashion industry for its failures— is more conservative than it is ‘edgy’ and merely exposes Rich and Rains for what bad designers they are.
Yeah, they’re really terrible.
MUSIC FOR THE DAY
I love Mistah F.A.B.’s new video and am absolutely fanatical about the hyphy scene (the rich aesthetics in “Ghost Ride It” vaguely remind me of those florid, ambitious, surrealist videos Busta Rhymes was making ten years ago). It’s been great seeing the Bay Area finally get its due after years and years and years of having produced some of the best MCs in hip-hop. As tribute to those who built the house that hyphy now dwells in, I offer a couple of tracks from two of my favourite underground Bay Area records of the 1990s, Rappin’ Ron and Ant Diddley Dog’s Bad-N-Fluenz and Rappin’ 4-Tay’s Don’t Fight the Feelin’.
“You Ain’t Heard Shit Yet” from 1995’s Bad-N-Fluenz.
“Dank Season” from 1994’s Don’t Fight the Feeling.
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